The battery is basically defunct and I had to replace the keyboard but it does still work on mains power. I bought the original EeePC 701 when it came out but replaced it as soon as the 900 was available. And yeah, the default OS sucked. I replaced it with Sidux immediately.

It came with Xandros but I immediately replaced that with Debian  

Im amazed that you have an EeePC running still. I had the original model of those  

I still have an ASUS EeePC 900 which has 1GB RAM. antiX works fine on it but it's relegated to a cupboard most of the time since I got a ThinkPad Yoga 11e. It's probably more testament to any lightweight Linux rather than any specific one. Arch has always been too high maintenance for me with constant upgrades. Sure the upgrades mostly go smoothly but they still need to be done. It's the same reason I switched from using siduction for many years to now using Debian Stable.